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Would you like to hear my journey through money problems like gambling addiction in chapter 4 of Speaker Meeting 2017? I'll start with my gambling addiction, and then I'll move into more general money issues. Now, if you didn't get the gambling addiction thing in particular, I think a lot of this will still be helpful for you because these things all relate to any other obsessive behavior you might do that's unnecessary. Now, the difference in some of the other things I'll talk about is, things like eating are necessary. You need to do them. They need to be balanced out. You can't just quit eating. The same thing with work. You have to work, more than likely. Most of us have to work. You can't just quit going to work.

But gambling and a lot of these money issues you can completely just stop doing them. You don't have to do them. These are kind of optional, behavioral addictions. Optional behavioral addictions are much easier than non optional ones. That's why a lot of people, they're not an alcoholic. They can have a drink or two. They have reasonable sex things handled, or they just don't have sex in their life. And their money issues are pretty ... But when it comes to eating, when it comes to things like work, they have a really hard time, because you can't just cut those off. To me, this is a gateway, if you can get into your addictive behaviors, especially as they relate to money or gambling, you can use the things I've learned. These, to me, are gateway behaviors to live a completely better life and to fix everything.

Will you join me for the full experience by watching the video or reading the posts here which is the transcript directly from the video because reading or hearing this story may help a lot to overcome money problems?

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Welcome to Speaker Meeting 2017, the money section. Would you like to hear my journey through gambling addiction in this, and through the bigger issues related to money that go into having something like a gambling addiction? Now, the big difference in this section from looking at sex and alcohol, for example, is that money and gambling, these are things that there's no physical component. There's no substance going in my body. There's no part of my body and connection in the brain or whatever. These are purely behavioral issues.

Now, the amazing thing is that I've learned and discovered first hand and seen in others, that behavioral issues drive almost everything in our life. How we behave is all interconnected. We like to blame things like alcohol or substances or parts of our body or our weight, we like to blame these things on physical components, because theoretically, we can't do anything about it. We can just be stuck as a victim then, and, "Oh, well, I've got this thyroid condition, so I'm overweight," or, "Well, I'm an alcoholic, so I have to just drink," or, "Well, I have a male body part or female one, I have to just use it. It has its needs." And then there's this element that we're just helpless. We're victims. We have no choice.

When you look at something like behavioral issues, like things with money and gambling, these things then get real hot and debated and contested, because there is none of that blameless component in the terms of physical. These are purely mental, purely behavioral issues. And they all do have physical components. If you put some money down for a bet, your hands may start sweating. You might start salivating. You might get anxious, afraid, butterflies in the stomach, jitter. There's all kinds of things that can happen physically. But this is a big difference to some people. To me, these things are all intimately connected. What I do with sex, what I do, or gratefully, don't do with alcohol or any other substance, all relates to the things I do with money, gambling, and all the other things, like eating and managing emotions. All these things go intimately together.

The more you can get into your behavioral issues, the more you can get into other things that may have another physical component that make them even more difficult to deal with. For me, I'm going to share with you, I'll start with my gambling addiction, and then I'll move into more general money issues. Now, if you didn't get the gambling addiction thing in particular, I think a lot of this will still be helpful for you because these things all relate to any other obsessive behavior you might do that's unnecessary. Now, the difference in some of the other things I'll talk about is, things like eating are necessary. You need to do them. They need to be balanced out. You can't just quit eating. The same thing with work. You have to work, more than likely. Most of us have to work. You can't just quite going to work or [manage it 00:03:22].

But gambling and a lot of these money issues you can completely just stop doing them. You don't have to do them. These are kind of optional, behavioral addictions. Optional behavioral addictions are much easier than non optional ones. That's why a lot of people, they're not an alcoholic. They can have a drink or two. They have reasonable sex things handled, or they just don't have sex in their life. And their money issues are pretty ... But when it comes to eating, when it comes to things like work, they have a really hard time, because you can't just cut those off. To me, this is a gateway, if you can get into your addictive behaviors, especially as they relate to money or gambling, you can use the things I've learned. These, to me, are gateway behaviors to live a completely better life and to fix everything.

For me, gambling was one of the most outward looking addictions I had. If you watched me drink every moment, you might've thought I was an alcoholic. Based on what I've told you, you might've thought that, too. But most of the time you watch me drink, you might not have seen some big problem. And with my sex issues, outwardly you might not have seen a big problem. So what? He takes a little time for himself everyday. He watches some adult movies, and he has had a girlfriend or a relationship about half of his adult life. You wouldn't see any big issues there, on the surface at least.

Now, if you watched me gamble, gambling was the most obvious outward addiction I had, because I was completely insane when it came to gambling. I would like to you one day about gambling. I'd say, "I'm never gambling again," and a few hours later, I'd be going to put a wire transfer on. I remember telling my friends one day at our dining hall in college that I was done with gambling. I just wasn't gonna do it again. And it was just a few hours before I was going to put a wire transfer on and I was going to get that money and start gambling again online with it. Gambling was one of those things to me that felt completely like an addiction.

Alcohol, at first, didn't feel much like an addiction, and I didn't recognize that things with my sex for a long time. But the gambling, within just a few months of starting to gamble, it felt like a heavy addiction. It felt like complete craziness. What an addiction feels like is, the easiest word to put is inconsistency. When you tell someone you're gonna do something one day or a few hours, and then you do the opposite thing of what you just said, those are signs of an addiction. That's called lying, and that is very unhealthy. And it's amazing, some of these behaviors that many of us take for granted.

For example, I was giving away a trunk full of stuff at Salvation Army the other day, and the guy there at Salvation Army, I was telling him how he said about getting a receipt, and I'm like, "Well, it doesn't matter. I'm probably not gonna write off $11,000 in donations all year." And he said, "Well, just throw on an extra computer or two. Just put a few extra things. You'll get up there pretty easily." And what I'm hearing in my head, that's one of those seeming little behaviors. That's also called tax fraud. That can be federal prison time, for throwing on a couple of extra computers and trying to cut the IRS out of a few dollars. That could be federal prison time.

That is another example in someone else of the same kinds of things that went on with me with gambling. It's those inconsistencies. It's those seemingly small lies with big consequences if you get caught, big weights on your consciousness to just kind of minorly suggest something like tax fraud to someone you don't even know, or for me and my gambling, to tell my friends one thing and then to be going and doing the exact opposite of what I just told them just a few hours ago. "I'm never gambling again, I'm done with it." And what am I doing? I'm going down and gambling.

How did I get started online gambling and what did that look like? Before I even was born, my dad was a big gambler. He loved playing cards. He loved betting at the racetrack. One of his best stories was when he was 16, 17, 18. At the racetrack, he made some bet and he won $10,000 on that bet. This happened around 1970. $10,000 was a lot of money. That'd be about $100,000 today. He won't this $10,000 and he went down to the car dealership. He bought a brand new Corvette, and he went and raced it around and wrecked it, and he walked back to the car dealership and bought another Corvette and went racing around, all in the same day, after he won all this money.

Gambling is very much something that my father was into, and while I never saw my father do hardly any gambling, my father taught us how to play cards at home and play poker, like 5 Card Draw. I, for some reason, had this latent love or desire to gamble. And my great grandfather, as I've mentioned before in this, died. He was getting drunk and was driving drunk on the way home from a poker game, and died wrecking into a tree, and then getting X-rayed at the emergency room with a broken neck. That actually killed him at the hospital. The gambling thing, it's there throughout my family, and thankfully, this is one of those things, I just stayed away. I didn't gamble. I was very conservative with my money going off to college. I gently borrowed as little money as I could, starting out in college.

Then, once I started drinking, about a year after I started drinking, one of my friends started playing poker online. I think it was on Poker Stars. My friend showed me how he was playing poker online, and I thought, hey, maybe I'll give that a try, because I liked to play some cards, play a little poker occasionally with my friends when I was in college. This was in 2004, the end of my sophomore year. I started playing poker online just a little bit. The biggest I lost in one night was $75. Now, at this time, I was crazy cheap. I was really cheap. I nickel and dimed every possible place I could. I had no credit cards. I did everything in cash. I only borrowed a little tiny bit to go to school. I was extremely conservative with my money back then. I'd spent nothing extravagantly. I wouldn't buy any book or anything except a video game occasionally. I bought Madden. I spent my money, I was very thrifty.

So, for me to lose $75 on gambling was a lot to lose in one night. I operated on $500 a month or so, maybe $1,000 at most, back then. That was my budget. Losing that was a ton of money for me back then. As I then went into junior year- while I had friends around all the time sophomore year, junior year I was a lot more isolated. I moved off campus, and I was by myself a lot. One of the things you'll consistently notice across this whole speaker meeting is being by yourself, not surrounded by people that love you, being off by yourself somewhere, being antisocial is a very good recipe to get sick, to pick up addictions, to start making bad habits, and to stick with those bad habits even when you get in a more loving environment. This is what happened to me. Junior year was one of the most isolated, antisocial years of my life, and gambling became one of my new friends, one of my new hobbies, especially once I learned that I could consistently win.

I played these $5 Heads Up modes. It was one on one poker. The chips would go up every so often. They wouldn't usually take longer than 30 minutes. You both put in like $5.25 or something. The website took 50 cents then, and then whoever won got $10 out of it. I played a bunch of those, and by senior year, I'd counted those up. I'd played like 5 or 600 of them or something, and I had something like a 62 or 63% win percentage. Once I discovered I could actually make a little bit of money playing $5 Heads Ups, I was really excited. I played a lot. I started playing a bunch of $5 Heads Up games, and drinking. I would get a bottle of liquor, even though I wasn't 21. I always had someone buy it for me and always stocked up. I never ran out of liquor.

Liquor and gambling, to me, went together because gambling, to me, was stressful. What I liked about it was the feeling of winning, and I mostly just gambled playing drinking games with my friends sophomore year. But junior year, I got into gambling with real money online, and it went great, because my idea then, if I was all by myself, if say, my friends were out doing something else and I hadn't taken the time to ask them or make any plans, which was very common for me in junior year, then I would just get a bottle of liquor and sit down and gamble and play video games and drink and watch movies all night. I usually would gamble until I either lost all my money, or until I won enough money to call it a night, or sometimes I just got tired or bored with it. That probably happened about a third of the time, too. Some nights, I'd play and I'd win and I'd start with 20.

I used to be able to put money on [straight 00:13:37] with checks from my bank account. That was incredibly convenient. That's how I gambled online about the first year. The problem was the one night that things went really well. I gambled, I would say, fairly responsibly. It was just a hobby. $5 or $10 here. The most I'd usually do is a $20 Heads Up, and I noticed my win percentage dropped as the game price went up because only people who are bad usually played $5 Heads Ups. The better people would play the $10, the $20, the $50, the $100+ Heads Up. The people who really knew more what they were doing about poker would invest more money to play Heads Up, because then you could make some good money, but you also had to be a much better player.

So, the $5 Heads Ups were easy money. I played most of those, but then sometimes when I had played a bunch of $5 Heads Ups and I got bored with that, often, if I won a bunch of them, I'd get kind of bored with it. I'd have this money sitting around, and I'd go play in a tournament then. Now, tournaments were much more difficult because these were thousands of people, not one on one, but at a table of 9 people. I usually didn't know what to do at a table with 9 people, and I'd be drinking. Lots of times, I'd be pretty drunk by the time I got into a tournament. I would usually just play completely wild.

I would sandbag a good hand and slow play it and surprise you at the end. I would just make a ridiculous stupid bluff and push the pot and take that a few times. I would just play completely crazy, and everything I did was some kind of lie. Everything I said in the chat was some kind of lie. I even messed my own head up, so then I wouldn't know what play style I was doing, so people couldn't read me. It was all online, so you couldn't read faces. You really just had to play the cards and try and figure out the sucker at the table, which often was me.

One of these tournaments, I put in $10 at 3 in the morning. Usually, I wasn't that good at the tournaments. I'd lose out by about 4 in the morning or 5 in the morning on a $10 tournament, and then I would go to bed at that point. Well, on this one, I stayed up until 10 in the morning, and I got second place out of 1,000 something people, which netted me 800 and something dollars in winnings out of that tournament. That's when my gambling addiction really took off, because before that, I just put on a little bit. I didn't lose too much, I didn't win too much. It wasn't a big deal. This is where most gambling addictions I see take off. If you go to the store and buy a few scratch offs and you don't win anything, you're not likely to really get hooked on it and keep coming back and buying more. I've bought some lottery tickets in my life. I've never won more than like 10 bucks. There's just nothing to get excited about.

The people that get a gambling addiction just like me are the ones who win. And when I turned $10 into $847 or whatever, I had such a high opinion of myself all of a sudden. I made it. I have arrived. Here we go. Jerry, the gambler. This is what I know how to do. This is what I'm good at. I have arrived. Welcome. From there, I got a big ego about gambling. I said, "You know what? I'm good at gambling." I got the real high of winning. I remember bragging to all my friends how I'd won all this money, because winning that much money in college, that was like more than a month of expenses. That was a huge winning for me. I got a check in the mail. Who knows where the check came from, but I cashed it and it went through and everything. From there, I got my gambling addiction. From there, I got hooked to that big win feeling. That big win feeling, I kept chasing that and chasing that and chasing that. From there, my gambling turned into more and more of an addiction.

Instead of just playing in $5 Heads Ups and occasionally playing in a $10 or a $20 game, I started playing in the $10 or $20 games on a regular basis. I started playing in the $10 rebuy tournaments, where one of the strategies to do was just keep shoving your chips in, over and over until you just got lucky and cleaned up a big hand for $40 to $100+. Then, what you do is use that to play deeper into the tournament. Some of the $10 rebuy tournaments, I would end up putting in $100 to one of those, and I would never even get one hand. I'd lose out on every single pot. I'd come out having lost $100 and only got to play for an hour or two.

I started losing more money, and then I started getting into some really bad depressions after losing money. Some of the nights, I'd have put on $50 or $100. I remember going to [Buy Low 00:18:45] one time after. I used to put money on with my checking account, and then at one point, I put on so much money in my checking account, I put all that $800 back on and lost it. Now, instead of playing the $5 Heads Ups, I started consistently losing more money. I'd have nights where I'd lose $50 or $100 instead of losing $20 or $30 here and there, and then having lots of nights where I won $20 or $50. So, I started having a lot more nights where I'd get drunk and lose my whole bankroll. I started operating with a bigger bankroll. Instead of having $20 or $30 on and winning some and losing some, I'd start having $50, $100, $200 on at a time. And then I'd have these drunk nights. I still was decent at poker, but I'd have these drunk nights where I'd just lose my whole bankroll.

Then, one drunk night, I emailed them, told them I had a gambling addiction, and then they banned my account. So, that began a series of all kinds of different ways to get around the bans that I'd even made. Then, I just signed up for a new account, and then I realized you could use a money transfer with Western Union to put money on without having to use a payment method. The problem with this was, this required a $15 or so fee, because it was essentially a wire transfer. Now with BitCoin, you can do all this with a lot lower fees. It required a bigger deposit, essentially.

With my checking account, if I put $50 or $100 on, that used to last me for a month or two, because I'd usually win some with it and lose some with it, but I consistently won. A lot of times, if I put the money on with my checking account before I won the big money, it'd last awhile. After this big winning, I started going through a lot more money. I started, on a regular basis, doing things like putting $50 or $100+ on, because that transfer fee was so high, you really needed to deposit more money at once. Then, I consistently started losing my entire bankroll in one night as I tried to recapture the big win again, as I tried to go for that first place in the tournament again.

One night, just a few months later, I was in a rebuy tournament with more than $10,000 in prizes. If you got second place in that tournament, you would get like $5,000+. To me back then, that was a year's worth of money in my mind. I was in second place in that tournament for awhile. I had just went on a complete tilt. Everything good thing that can happen to me, happened to me. I got pocket Jacks. I played Texas Hold'em mainly, but I've tried all kinds of other games. I got pocket Jacks. I got in on against pocket Queens, pocket Kings, pocket Aces, and I got pocket 10's, all on one hand, and I got 4 Jacks. I got quad Jacks on that hand and absolutely blew everyone away. I had a massive stack of chips. Even if I just would've slow played and sandbagged at that point, I had a good chance at wining thousands of dollars out of that tournament. But what did I do? I got that much by playing crazy aggressive, and within just a few minutes, I lost it.

That night, I went on an epic tilt. I ended up playing in a $500 Heads Up game that night. Now, I got into that to compensate for my original loss, and by this point, I was putting on hundreds of dollars at once. I played $100 Heads Up. I won that. I played a $200 Heads Up. I won that. Then, I put in and played a $500 one on one game and lost that. I lost my mind. I smashed my whole dorm room. This was when I was a senior, and I was drunk, as a resident advisor. I smashed my whole dorm room up. I smashed the keys off my keyboards. I picked things up and threw them all over. I smashed my hand. I hit the cable connection on the wall so hard it tore my hand open. There was blood all over the wall.

I had two beds in my room. I smashed, I banged, I punched everything, turned the whole room upside down, and just passed out on my bed. When I woke up the next morning, it looked like a Tasmanian devil or tornado had came in and just turned my whole room, everything- the computer was still on and there was blood all over the walls because of smashing, cutting my hand open and hitting everything everywhere. My gambling addiction really brought out the nasty side in me.

Another day- I think this was the day I went to Daytona that I talked about in the alcohol section- I was in the very end of one of these tournaments. I think it was a qualifier. So, if you got in this qualifier, you got to play in a big boy tournament that had a several hundred dollar buy in. This was a cheap little qualifier, and something like, all you had to do is place in the top 43 or something, and you would get to go qualify into the big tournament. I busted out at like 47 because I went all in on a Jack two off suit or something like that. I was just so pissed off at this. I put the background on my desktop with a screenshot of what I'd done, with the big 3 letters "WTF," and then like, "Jack two all in."

That was my life for the next year after I won that big tournament. I had a gambling addiction bad, on and off gambling. Eventually, senior year, I think I reconnected my bank account. I was able to open another account or reconnect one, because I got it so I could deposit money again with my bank account. Then, I was taking money straight out of my bank account, and I made myself broke. This is when I started opening up credit cards to cover the difference. The gambling addiction led into credit cards. It led into me spending more money than I had to spend. It led into my unhealthy spending habits.

Even though I wouldn't borrow money, technically, to gamble- thankfully I had some insight that I really was gonna screw my whole life up if I did that- I used all the cash I had to gamble, and then I would need basic expenses, like going to the store and buying groceries. Just a few months down the road, I ended up running all this stuff up on credit cards. From the moment I started on credit cards, my debt has continually snowballed, up until the last year, where I finally started paying it down. These bad gambling habits also transformed into bad money spending habits as an adult, money spending habits that kept me broke and kept me in debt, that all got started with that gambling addiction. I don't know that I would've ever ran up credit card debt if I hadn't got into all these shameful money spending habits with gambling. I had a very healthy outlook on spending money until I won that gambling tournament. And guess what? I won another one of those tournaments, except instead of getting second, I got first.

Then senior year, I actually figured out a way to start cheating on the website. We'd do these 6 person tournaments, and we'd get two or three other people from our dorm room. We'd all pile into the same one, and then we would all sit there and look at all each other's cards. The first and second place people got paid in these 6 person tournaments, and I think the payout was anywhere from $20 to $50 each or something. So, we would stay up all night and cheat in these poker tournaments. We'd go into these 6 man tournaments and then we'd compare cards, and we'd play other people off each other. So, if one of us had a bad hand and another one of us had a good hand, then the one with the good hand would get the one with the bad hand to bet and buff their chip stack up and get a third party in to raise their bet. Then, the one with the bad hand would fold out, and the one with the good hand would take the other guy down.

Then, we'd also have different strategies. If one of us had a good high card and another one of us had a flush chase, we'd both stay in so that each of us could have a chance to try and see who was gonna win, and then we never had to bet against each other. That gave us really good odds. We'd both try and stay alive. We, in fact, would even try and feed each other chips back and forth. If one of us was big stack and another one was just close to getting put out, and we saw the small one was gonna win, we'd go in against each other and shift our chips back and forth. We did some great cheating in those tournaments, and then we were able to consistently make money doing that. We'd sit up and do as many of those as we could.

So, just a year after winning that first tournament, I'm deep into a gambling addiction. By then, I'm gambling almost every night. I'm telling my girlfriend she can't come over because I want to gamble, and I'm gambling with the guys on my residence hall. So, not only am I engaging in this, but I got a bunch of the other freshman guys involved in gambling online with me as well. I don't think anyone gambled online when they started college. I got 4 or 5 other people gambling online by the end of the year with me. We'd get together and have poker games, too, and those were a lot of fun. We'd sit down and have a real poker game, and we'd all get our liquor drinks and put our cash, and we'd play poker all night.

Now, I thought that's as good as life could get. You might look at these and think, well, these are kind of harmless college things. These messed up my view on money a lot going forward because while I was raised very much with the view that money's evil and bad, but it's a really good practical tool. You just make your money, save it up, spend it on things you need, and then you have a nice life. Well, when you throw gambling into it, money all of a sudden is this tool for happiness, and winning a bunch of money is associated with being happier. Then, having more money is associated with being happier. I really got the sickness and greed for money involved in all this gambling.

By the end of senior year in college, when I move off into my own apartment off campus again, I'm away from all the guys I was hanging out with senior year, then it's no fun anymore. It's just the addiction. It's just me, sitting there pathetic, gambling online by myself, getting drunk by myself. It's really pathetic. Now, I'm as broke at this point in my life as I'd ever been. This is when I got into the credit cards. I had almost no cash to buy anything with. I was too broke to buy a car because I couldn't even make a car payment. I walked two miles- I got a ride lots of times and a cab- but I walked lots of times two or three miles to go to work at this federal court where I got an internship because I got a criminal justice bachelor's degree. I get a full time internship there, and all I'd be thinking about all day at work was, "When am I gonna get to go home? When am I gonna get to gamble next?"

And now, I had an actual full time income coming in, after getting through the initial period of moving into my apartment and getting graduated and stuff. I had this full time income coming in. Having no money, having gambled it away, wanting to buy a car, realizing I need to save every dollar I make, and then having another night where I'm drunk and alone, sitting there gambling all by myself, crying and talking to my roommate. Finally, I decided I've got to quit this gambling addiction. I've really got to quit. By this time, it was two years or so after I'd won that big poker tournament, the first big poker tournament that I'd won.

By now, I had tried to quit at that point in June 2006. I had tried to quit gambling online, I don't know, 10, 20, 30+ times. I'd tried to quit a bunch. Through senior year, several more times I managed to get myself banned from one website or another. I'd get unbanned. I'd make a new account. I'd set my bank account up again. It was amazing. I would get banned one night, I'd lose all my money and have a bunch of remorse and send them an email, asking them to ban me from the website, and the next day, I would figure out how to get signed up back on there and be back at it. That's an addiction. That's a bad addiction, when you're doing stuff like that. I figured out, if I created a Poker Stars account on a different IP address, so I just went down to the computer lab, and I could just create a new Poker Stars account, and then it would let me hook my same bank account back up on the account I got banned, and I'd be right back on, right back in business.

So, I just did that senior year. I'd get banned from one account or another. I'd get banned on the chat for calling people all kinds of names. I'd make another account. I probably have 5 or 10 Poker Stars accounts still. By the end of senior year, by getting this full time job and just sitting there, wanting to gamble all day, I finally had enough pain out of it, that I really said, "Okay, I'm gonna quit." And I then quit for 6 or 7 months. I didn't gamble online again, and I'd consciously decided, I know I need to replace my online gambling with something.

By this time, I had gotten so bored with playing Texas Hold'em because Texas Hold'em is God awful boring. I mean, you get 2 cards, and there's 5 cards that come down. You get 2 cards to start, 3 cards come down after that at once, and then you get one more card and one more card, and then you make the best 5 card hand you can out of those 7 cards, and oh my God, it's boring. You play it like 1,000 hours, you know every hand, ou know the odds back and forth on exactly what can come down, and it's just so boring. I used to play like 4 or 5 tables at a time. So boring.

So, I finally said, "Okay, it's boring anyway. I'm just gonna play video games and drink instead of gambling." So that's what I did. I consciously switched out of my gambling and switched into just playing video games. Now, I was so bored, I already was drinking, gambling, and then I was alt-tabbed over in a World of Warcraft or World War [II 00:34:18] online at the same time I was playing poker. I already was gaming and gambling and drinking at the same time, so I just finally switched over and said, "Okay, let's just stop the gambling and stick to video gaming." For 7 months, that worked out just fine.

Meanwhile, I would get drunk and get these ideas that I was gonna go to Las Vegas and just run the budget up on my credit card. Go by myself, too. Not even go with any friends. I was getting drunk and calling the airport up, "When's the next flight to Vegas?" and all that. They probably get lots of those from drunks like me. So, I went 7 months without gambling online. Meanwhile, I started spending money irresponsibly for the first time in my life outside of gambling. I had spent my money very responsibly up until this point. I started spending my money without regard to how much I had. I got these 0% interest credit cards, and I just started running up stuff on them. If I wanted a new video game, I'd just buy it.

Up until this point, I had done everything in cash, but I'd ran my cash so low, and then I bought a car, and then I moved in. I barely was able to paly any of my bills, so I just started running things up on credit cards. This unhealthy money habit with gambling, turned into credit card debt. By the time I got to the end of the year, I had several thousand dollars in credit card debt, and I had a job paying $20,000 a year, along with student loans and paying my own share of rent and soon to be a place that I was living in the ghetto. So, about 6, 700 a month expenses on a $20,000 a year job, plus my student loans were another couple hundred a month, and then these credit cards.

Well, by the end of 2006, I had one more night. I worked in corrections, so I worked in corrections on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It was absolutely miserable. I remember the major chewing me out, saying something like I should just quit, that I didn't have what it took to manage these kids. The kids had awful ways of celebrating Christmas, let me tell you that. It was horrible. I really missed being at home for Christmas, and I did it to myself. I easily could've just asked my parents to move home. I easily could've fixed my life up, but I chose not to. I chose, "I got this. I'm gonna do this on my own."

Then, I had a relapse on my gambling online. All of a sudden, one night, I was trying to manage my drinking. I think it was December 26th, in the evening. I think it was the day after Christmas. I'd just worked two miserable days at corrections. I felt like absolutely pond scum about myself, and I thought, "Well, a 12 pack of Bud Select will fix this up." So I went to the liquor store, I bought a 12 pack of Bud Select, and I said, "I'm not gonna drink liquor. I don't wanna get into any trouble. I'm just gonna have a few beers." My roommate had this bottle of Cruzan rum, disgusting. He said, "Would you just not drink any of that?" I'm like, "Sure, that's disgusting. I don't even like that anyway."

Well, I had just got banned from a video game I'd played for 5 or 6 years, so I didn't have a game I was playing, and I got bored, and I was all alone. And after drinking a few beers, I decided to sign up on Full Tilt poker online, and I managed to fund a couple hundred dollars off a credit card onto Full Tilt, after having a few beers and swearing I'd never gamble online again. It didn't take long for me to break into my roommate's rum either. I must've knocked out half of his half of his half gallon. I must have drank about a half liter of his rum, and of course, like a good alcoholic, I just filled it back up with water and acted like I didn't do anything.

Meanwhile, I drank all my beers and all that liquor. The last game I had played online, I had lost my whole first $100 I'd put on. Now remember, I was so broke, I could barely pay any of my bills. I was borrowing and running up money on credit cards. By the last game I played- I played $100 Heads Up. Now remember, I hadn't been playing in quite awhile, but I'd played thousands of these games before. I played $100 Heads Up, one on one Texas Hold'em, and I said, "I'm just going to kill myself if I lose this game, because financially, I will just be ruined." I can't stand to wake up the next morning and face having lost another $200 from gambling, when I'm already so far in the hole. At this point, I was so drunk. I had my new gun. I was literally celebrating every time I won a Heads Up, I was firing rounds out the door. I wasn't winning that many. As you can tell, I lost my first hundred.

But I played this $100 Heads Up. I think it was against a lady. I told her, I told her honestly what I was planning. I said, "I'm going to kill myself if I lose this game." She was beating me at first, and I guess telling her these things got her shook up. I don't know if she let me win or what. I was serious about killing myself, too, if I lost the game. I don't know what happened, but I won the game. I think she let me win. I got the $200, and I put it back in my bank account. I fired some more rounds out the front and back door of the house to celebrate. No one else was home, and thank God no one called the police. Then, I threw up a whole bunch of times and passed out.

That was the last time I gambled online until 2014, April, the last time I drank. Now, I had a similar experience gambling online the last time I was going to drink. I remembered having told the lady 8 years before about killing myself, and that worked. So, I tried the same trick on another $100 Heads Up with my last $100 that night, and I lost. God really called my bluff on that one. But thankfully, I woke up the next morning and I realized I really was going to kill myself if I didn't stop drinking. There's no way I would've gambled online either of those last two times if I didn't drink. If I'd have been sober, there's no way I would've gambled online. I prayed to God. I said, "God, please. I'll do anything to get sober." And thank God, I have not gambled online since then, either. Well, at least playing poker. There's more to this whole story. Just because I stopped gambling online in 2006, except with that one little relapse the last time I drank, that doesn't mean that's the end of my gambling story. Oh, no.

I appreciate you going through this with me live, because it saves me a ton of time on sitting there, trying to edit every individual breath out and things like that. I feel that this comes off more natural and more honest, just doing it live, because I'd be tempted to try and make myself look better, you know? Maybe cut out the part about telling that lady you were going to kill yourself if you didn't win a Heads Up game of poker. Maybe cut that part out about firing the gunshots out the door, too. I'd be tempted to edit out a lot of things. To me, it's just easy. I just honestly do this and present this all out to you, and this is part of my recovery from not doing these same things again. To just tell you about them, so that I remember how things were. That helps me have the willingness today to do anything to have things be nice and peaceful today. I appreciate you going through with me coughing and having a little tea here real quick.

Now, just because I didn't gamble online habitually anymore after 2006, with my little relapse in 2014, doesn't mean I stopped gambling. Oh, no. In fact, this is when I started trying to gamble at the casino. After I quit gambling in 2006 online, then I started going to the casino with my friends as often as possible. I believe we went, the first time was either 2007 or 2008. We went up to Fox Woods, and we went up to the Mohican in Connecticut because my one friend lived up there. Instead of gambling online, I started planning these extravagant gambling trips with my friends. I'd never been to the casino at this point. I started investing big money in these gambling trips with my friends.

The first one, I think it was 2007. We went up to Fox Woods in Connecticut and the Mohican. Well, I traveled up to Connecticut, and then it might actually be in New Hampshire or something. I don't know. When I went up there, Fox was a huge, grand casino. Very nice, all kinds of poker tables. I gambled like no other up there. Epic gambling binge. I did nothing but gamble. Get up, gamble all day, drink all day, and then go to bed. I thought that was just heaven. I must've brought like a $1,000 to gamble with, and I lost absolutely all of it in 4 or 5 days. And I was proud of myself for not losing it all the first day. As you'll find, sometimes I end up do losing it all the first day.

I want to tell you how I would be at these poker tables. My god. Online, you couldn't see the people, and you couldn't even talk to them that much. It was a lot of antisocial people, sitting there, just looking at cards, trying to take money from other people. Gambling online is really, really a lame existence, from my experience at least. There's a lot better ways to live. In person, you've got the people to deal with. So, I took on this lying persona that was hard to believe, because there was no way I was going to sit down at a poker table sober. I'd get a drink, or preferably many drinks in me, and just hit as many free drinks as possible, and the lying was unbelievable.

I'd lie about everything for no reason. I'd tell you I was from somewhere else. I would lie about what I did. I would lie about everything. And everything that came out of my mouth was a lie. I'd lie about the cards I had in my hand. I'd lie, whatever the opposite was. If I had a great hand, I'd lie and tell you I had crap. If I had a crap hand, I'd lie and tell you I had a good one. I'd lie to no end. Sometimes, people would just bust me out. They'd see through, or they'd get lucky, and they'd just knock me out. This one guy had something like an 8 deuce, and I had an Ace, King, and he destroyed me. I went all in for like $150, and I got busted out of the table before my drink even came. That, to me, is one of those humiliating things that can happen in a casino. You get busted out before your drink even comes. That really sucks. Or you've re-bought before your drink's even arrived.

I went through the weekend with my friends, and by the end of the weekend, there was drama with my friends. We'd had enough of each other, and I had no more money, and I couldn't wait to do it again. I'd finally gotten a better job by this point. I was saving up some money. $1,000 setback when you make $30,000 a year, that's a gigantic setback. That's $1,000 that could've paid a credit card down. By this time, my credit card debt was continuing to grow, and I was juggling it from one 0% interest card to another. So, I couldn't wait to do this again. I couldn't wait to go gamble with my friends again, as soon as possible.

After we went of to Connecticut and to Fox Woods, then I made this trip with a friend and his wife. We went down to Tampa to gamble at the Hard Rock and then at the dog track down there. So, I had much the same experience there, except the drinks weren't free, which was really annoying. I ended up blowing all my money over the course of the trip, $500+ in gambling budget alone. Then, I ended up becoming so broke and so beat down from all my alcoholism, I ended up moving home with my parents. So, up until this point, you might not think the gambling was too bad. This is when the gambling even started to take it to another level.

In Mississippi, there's not a lot to do, at least near where my parents live. There was a college town. This is just my old way of thinking. I realize this is all crap. There's a lot to do everywhere you go. You could just go walk out in a field and look at the trees all day. There's all kinds of things to do, but this is how I used to think. There's nothing to do. It's boring. One of the only things to do around here is go to the casino. So, living with my parents was quite stifling lots of times. They required no drinking at home, and I associated drinking with fun, and I associated drinking with coping with problems. But I wasn't just gonna try and go out and drink and stay in a hotel somewhere. Now, that made me feel like an alcoholic. What I was willing to do, and one of my dad's friends actually agreed to give me $200 in gambling money and allowed me then to go with him to go gamble to a casino.

But before that even, as soon as I moved home with my parents, there was this girl out in Las Vegas, and I'd been wanting to go to Las Vegas, especially going to these other casinos. I'm like, "I've gotta go see Las Vegas." So, I drove, I took a road trip out to Las Vegas after just moving in with my parents for a month, right after I took the Graduate Record Exam, or GRE, to go to graduate school. I drove out to Las Vegas. My parents were pissed. But they were allowing me to live at home, and since I wasn't causing any trouble at home, they thankfully were tolerant with me. I drove out to Las Vegas. I took almost all the cash I had, which was about $1,000, $1,500, and I left my credit cards and stuff at home so that I couldn't run up all this additional budget and ruin myself, because I knew how I got when I got drunk, and I tried to control it.

So, I drove all the way out to Las Vegas, and as soon as I saw this girl ... I had like a week that we had spent together before, and I had then told all my friends about it, including one of the other friends who'd got with her, so she was not very happy to see me. Somehow, she had wanted me to come out anyway, but I wasn't willing to admit any of my mistakes, so it was a real uncomfortable visit with her. So, what did I do? I said, "I'm not gonna waste this Vegas trip. I'm gonna make a good outing of it at the casino." So, I hit the casinos hard, and I drunk drove all over Las Vegas after going to the casinos.

I got there I think on Thursday. I left on Tuesday. By Monday- so, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday- I had blown my entire gambling budget. I was actually proud of myself for making it last that long, because I had gambled and drank almost all day, everyday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. It was her birthday on Sunday, actually, and I was supposed to be there with her family, and I drove to the casino and I got so drunk I couldn't drive. I bet on football games. I tried to hit every kind of table you could hit. I thought this was just the way to live.

By the time it was time for dinner with her family, I was wasted, and I just drank more at dinner and didn't hardly say anything. She was pretty unhappy, as you can imagine, but it was nice because I didn't have to pay for a hotel, so that saved me a whole lot of money. I couldn't have got one comped then because I'd never gambled at any of the casino rewards programs either. If they would've found out about me, they would've been happy. They sure have sent me offers since then. "Here's a free plane ticket and 2 nights and $50 gambling budget." I'm like, damn, that's insulting, $50 gambling budget.

By Monday, I spent most of the day at the Mirage. I got wiped out. I liked playing 3 card, I liked playing Blackjack by now. I'd started playing more of the house games, because the house games were a little less intense. I had to really get drunk and get to lying to play poker good, but the house games were a little more relaxing with lots of big win potential, but consistently, you just lose your money. I got wiped out, finally, at Caesar's Palace. I wound up on the $25 minimum Blackjack table. I walked in with $100 or a couple hundred dollars, and within 30 minutes, I'd lost the rest of my money. I tried to build it up and win big again.

So, guess what? I went home Tuesday. I said, hey, I'm out of gambling money, she doesn't like me anyway, I'm driving home. She protested. Hey, I'm out of gambling money. What the hell am I gonna do? Plus, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 had just come out, and I wanted to go home and play with my friends. Thankfully, I realized if I brought my Xbox I might get a little too comfortable staying with her, so I left my Xbox at home, and yes, I drove 1,800 miles back home to get to my Xbox.

I started going on these big, epic casino trips, and any money I got, I just ended up having a good opportunity to waste it. So, even just a few weeks after getting back from Vegas, my dad's friend gave me $200 to go gamble, took me up to [Tuneca 00:52:44] and took me to go to a football game. I managed to blow his $200 playing 3 card poker with the house. I went over to the Hold'em tables, managed to blow another $300 of mine. This was at a time I had very low expenses, but I was trying to pay all these credit card debts down and save up some money to go to grad school. So, these money spending habits were just terrible from gambling, and they infected all my other money spending habits.

Then, over the course of living with my parents, I continued to make these trips to the casino. These trips to the casino were some epic benders. Another one, I went with the same friend of my dad's. He didn't offer me any gambling money this time, but he did get a free hotel room, so we went. We got there at 7 PM. I gambled and drank straight until 7 AM, and I drove, so I was supposed to drive home. I came in, woke him up, took like 3 hours of sleep in the room. Meanwhile, he went out and gambled more in the morning, and then I drove back home with an awful hangover after that.

I lost my money that night. I took so many of these trips, they run together some. Another night, I broke up with this girl and I was all upset and I couldn't get over it, so I drove a couple hours away to another casino, blew like $300. This became a thing, to go blow money at the casino. Another time, I went off by myself, because by now, the casinos started to send me, "Hey, come get your own free room and a free dinner." So, one night, I went off by myself. I decided I didn't need my dad's friend, and I didn't even take my cellphone. My parents were really mad. By this time, I had a full time job making good money. I just stormed out of the house and said, "I'm going to the casino. I'll be back tomorrow. I've left my phone." And I drove off. They couldn't contact me. They didn't know where I was. They were really hurt at that.

That night, I went over to the casino. I had about $300. Well, there were 2 different nights just like this. One of the nights, I had about $300, and I lost my first $200 just on gambling and house games. I sat down at the Hold'em table with $100, and I demolished the whole table. Everyone who sat down, ended up getting bankrupt and giving me their money. Finally, I was the last person left at the table. I had something like $1,000, $1,500. I absolutely wrecking balled everyone, and it was lying like you couldn't believe. People had me exactly backwards. They thought I was telling the truth when I was lying, so my bluffs were really effective. Then they'd fool around and get in a hand with me where they were sure I was bluffing, and I actually had the goods. On this night, I actually hit quad Aces and won the daily jackpot as well, and I had like 4 people who'd called my bluff when I had pocket Aces, and an Ace came down, and I'm like, boom. I just wrecked, and I cleaned up a bunch of money.

Then I went over to the craps table and damn near lost it. I got all the way down on the craps table. I ended up having all of my money [back 00:56:13]. I had $200 on the pass line or something, and another $200 on something else. I had like $400 sitting on the craps table, after I'd won all this money, and it's like 6 in the morning. I end up having all this money tied up, and guess what number I throw? So, craps, there's 2 dice, 6 sides each. You can throw a 2 at a minimum, or you can throw a 12 at the maximum. 7 is the most likely number to get hit because every dice, there's a 1 in 6 chance you're going to hit a 7, based on whatever the other dice is. Basically, the odds of getting a 7 are about 1 in 6 because if the first dice has a 6, then if you hit a 1 on the second dice, then that's a 7.

Well, the idea of the game, you either want to hit a 7 on the first roll or an 11, because you win immediately. Or if you hit a 2 or a 12, maybe a 3, you crap out right away and lose. Anything other than a 7, 11, a 12, 2, or 3, then you have to roll that number again before you get a 7 to win, if you've bet the pass line. So, I've got all this money on there. I've got everything I had left, after I won this thousands of dollars. I got cleaned out. I got all the money I've got left bet on the craps table. Now remember, I came with $300, and I've got like $400 bet down on the table now, at the end of the night, drunk. I throw out the dice, and it's a damn 4. A 4 is one of the hardest numbers you can hit because there's not many ways to get a 4.

Let me tell you how many ways there are to get a 4. You have to throw a 1 on the first dice and a 3 on the second dice, you have to throw a 3 on the first dice and a 1 on the second dice, or you have to throw a 2 on both die. You see how difficult that is? That's difficult. So, I'm standing here like, oh my god, I'm gonna lose. And I'm just like, no, no, we gotta keep this positive right now. I've got all my damn money bet on hitting a 4 before I hit a 7. The odds on that suck. Most of the time you get in that spot, you're gonna lose. And damn, if I didn't roll out and the 2, 2 comes out. You can see I'm just getting euphoric recall just telling you about this. I throw out, and a damn 4 comes out. I win back up to about $1,000, which that's down like $300 to $500+ from what I pulled over from the poker table, but it's 7 in the morning and I'm finally ready to quit.

I pack up. I've got at least $1,000 in cash now. I came with $300, I got $1,000. I'm feeling real good. And remember, I got down to $100 when I went to the poker table earlier that night. So, I go up to my room, I pass out on my bed. I don't even pull the sheets out. I don't do anything in my room. I literally drop, pass out on the bed. Now, I was paranoid about getting charged for a night at the casino, because I got this for free. The maid comes in at like 1 in the afternoon. I've been drinking all night. I'm real sick. So, the maid comes in. I'm like, "Oh my god, I'm so sorry. I'm leaving right now." They auto check you out or something. I walk straight out of the room.

Meanwhile, I realize I have to throw up. I go hit the nearest bathroom, throw up in it. I go downstairs. I'm feeling deathly sick. I'm like, oh my god, I've got to get some food in my body to feel better. I stuff down a half sandwich. I pack up the other sandwich, and I go sit in the hotel bathroom, because I realize I can't hardly walk, I'm feeling so bad. I'm so sick. I'm puking. Thank god I held the lunch down. I realize I'm too hungover to drive. I'm too tired to walk out to the parking lot and get in the car, and I had to go to the bathroom anyway. I sat there for 2 hours in the casino bathroom and tried to sleep. There was some guy that sounded like Samuel Jackson talking on the phone half the time, which kind of lingered its way into a dream. So, here I am. I've got my hands down on my head, with my pants down on my knees, trying to sleep in the casino bathroom.

And I did that again. I did that twice in a casino bathroom. Another time, I came by myself with $300. This time, instead of getting lucky at the poker table, I got lucky at the 3 card table. I slid it out, and it was a straight flush. They give you 3 cards. This is a house game, kind of like Blackjack. I was going crazy. I'd bet like $25, $50, or $75. I'd bet a lot of money on this hand of poker. It was so stupid, because you could lose easily. I slide the cards out, and it's a 2, 3, 4 of diamonds. I just put my head on the table and start laughing. Instant $1,400 win right there.

I literally put my head down on the table and start giggling with joy. I think they gave me 1,700 chips or something, and I just throw out black hundred dollar chips to all the other people on the table who are all getting their butt kicked and losing their money. I just give everyone else, here's $100. Everyone, have $100 on me. I was feeling real good. Then I lost several hundred more at the poker table, but then I managed to still spend the night with $1,000 in my pocket that night. So, I had 2 nights where I came to the casino with $300 and came home with $1,000, I was feeling like I was just Mr. Big Time. I was trying to go to the casinos as often as possible.

My friends got a Las Vegas trip together in March. I had just went 5 months before. This time, I buy a plane ticket and I go out to Vegas with them. This time, I bring at least $1,000 budget or something like that, and I don't bring my debit card because I know I can get more money out. If I have my debit card, then I can get more money out that way. I don't bring my debit card. I just bring credit cards for things like meals and stuff. I get out there on that trip, and I end up getting this tattoo on the trip, right here. I end up getting this tattoo on the second night. On the first night we're there, I start drinking at the airport at 3 PM eastern, so noon Vegas time. We pull an all nighter. Drinking, gambling all night. I'm just so proud that I had any money left at the end of the night.

The second night we get there, I win all this money. I win hundreds of dollars playing Blackjack. I drop $400 on that tattoo, and I'm still up several hundred dollars from the original money I brought, so I'm feeling real good. Then, things start going downhill by the third day. By the fourth day, out of a 5 day trip, I've lost all my money. So, guess what? All my friends wanna do all day is drink and gamble, and I've got no money. I end up busting out all my money. I bust my credit card out and take cash advances for the first time, and not the last time. I take some cash advances on my credit card. I take out as much as $500 more, and by the end of the trip, I'm busted. I have no money left over. I'm completely broke.

I end up flying home with a god awful hangover. It was absolutely miserable. I couldn't even sleep on the plane. I remember sitting there at California Pizza Kitchen just before the flight back, wondering how I was possibly going to survive this. How am I going to survive this flight back? I'd never taken a plane flight back with a brutal hangover before, and it was awful. The worst part was the landing. Just when you think you've got through the whole flight, oh god, the landing. That was rough. Somehow, I made it back home. I used my police officer retirement money to fund that trip. I had $6,000 in police officer retirement, that if I just would've left there probably would've turned into a nice retirement. I paid the tax penalty to take that out, like 10%, plus, you have to pay tax on it. That's what I used my police officer retirement fund for, to go on a Las Vegas gambling trip.

Whoa, quick interruption here. I just had to finish filming that day and start again on another day. I'm really happy to pick up with you and keep sharing with you. What happened next? As I continued to go forward, I continued to gamble and continued to not be able to hold onto any money. As you can see, any time something came my way, like $6,000 in police officer retirement, hey, let's go take another Vegas trip. Let's go to the casino. I hoped going to graduate school would help fix some of these issues. The thing is, if you don't work on the issues themselves, they don't get fixed. They might disappear, hide in the background for a bit, but as soon as you get some free time, they'll come back.

In fact, I was given a full assistantship and scholarship to graduate school. The only thing I needed to borrow money for was my living situation, so that instead of having whatever small check I had as a graduate student, something like $1,500 or less a month to live on and to pay all my bills with, I borrowed some money and then could have twice as much every month and just take on some debt, right? Why not? When you're a gambler, hey, why not borrow money today and bet that you can do better tomorrow? When I got this full offer, I actually got the offer on the way to my Vegas trip.

I received a call on the phone, and I was in such a good mood on the way to my Vegas trip, that I said no to the best offer I had to graduate school at the time. I was offered a 2 year assistantship and $9,000 a year in pay and all my classes and tuition paid for and everything to be a master's student. I said, maybe you can do a little bit better than that. I wanna work on my PhD, and I'd like to have some more money, so why don't you do a little bit better than that? Now, that was a really cool thing. If I'd just been sitting at home, I might've had a bit more of a reasonable mind, but hey, I was going to gamble in Vegas. I was on top of the world. I figure, let me negotiate for something a little better. And guess what? I got something a little better. A minimum of 3 years of funding, $12,000+ a year, and straight into the PhD program. That's what I took.

On the way to go to the University of South Florida, which I attended and got my master's degree from 2 years later, until quitting to do my business, I went to go visit my master's and PhD program. What did I do one of the nights I was there? I went over to the dog track and played some cards, and I got a ride back to the hotel with a stranger after taking a cab there. This was how I was living my life. Any opportunity to go gamble, I took it. I felt proud of myself that I still had $20 left, after I went and burned up about $100 or so at the dog track, losing at cards and drinking. Then, of course the next morning, I was lucky to not have a horrible hangover as I went in to meet everyone at USF for the first time.

Once I went to USF, I thought that would just fix it. I'm gonna be a graduate student now, working on my PhD. I'm not gonna have time to go gamble. I figured, the last time I went to the dog track, which that was the last time, it wasn't that fun. I lost all my money except $20 for cab money, which then I didn't have to spend because I got a ride home from some guy I'd never met before. Then I thought, okay, I'm cured.

TO BE CONTINUED in PART 2!

Part 2 is live now at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/60vj7bec

View earlier chapters!

Chapter 1: Welcome at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/schmd2cm
Chapter 2: Sex at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/txgjjuij
Chapter 3: Alcohol at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/60ilq8m2

Love,
Jerry Banfield